Maybe it’s a good opportunity to build it into the engine, let us do some beta testing and get it ready for the next “real” project…? 
Actually, I thought this was one of the reasons for publishing Delores sources.
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Thanks, @RonGilbert! gameprop( … ) is working now.
This is all kind of a kludge, if I was doing this “for real”, talking would be built into the system (because of lipsync, etc).
No worries! I just need something quick & dirty to start going. I only hope I’m not being a PITA 
I think “breakwhilesound” is not working properly or I’m doing something wrong, because it doesn’t halt the thread. This is the code I have used (inside _startSayline):
if( actor?.talkie_sid ) {
startthread( @{
print( "Waiting talkie" )
breakwhilesound( actor.talkie_sid )
sayLine( actor, null )
print( "Talkie done" )
} );
} else {
startthread( @{
print( "Waiting seconds" )
breaktime( 5.0 )
sayLine( actor, null )
print( "Done" )
} );
}
Do you know what could be happening?
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You you post (or send me via DM) the entire _startSayline() function you are using and I’ll try it on my end.
Don’t worry at all about being a PITA, it’s fun for me.
4 Likes
We briefly thought about doing full voice for Delores. The actor that plays Delores is a good friend and we though it would be fun if she did Delores again and I did all the other voice.
Doing everything voice needs in the engine is a good month of work, so it’s a major undertaking. I’ll do it before my next game, but not anytime in the near future.
5 Likes
Um, that’s a shame. I thought you could rather easily copy the talking code from TWP and modify it to fit Delores within a day or two but a month is really a lot…
While from the outside they seem similar, the internal architecture is very different. One of the reasons I wanted to rewrite the TWP engine was it’s a complete mess. Talking was put in towards the end and it was a kludge.
7 Likes
There you have, @RonGilbert:
function _startSayline(actor, text) {
local text_scale = 3.0
local image = createTextImage(SAYLINE_FONT, TR(text), ALIGN_CENTER|(SCREEN_WIDTH*(0.80/text_scale)))
imageAt(image, point(SCREEN_CENTER_X, SCREEN_HEIGHT*0.90))
imageScale(image, text_scale)
imageColor(image, actor.talkColor())
imageTextOutline(image, COLOR_BLACK)
actor._sayline_image <- image
if (SETTING(jibber)) {
actor._jibber_sid <- playSound(actor?.jibber_sid)
}
local id = strslice(text, 0, 4)
local event = "event:/talkies/es/"+id
//local event = "event:/talkies/"+currentLanguage()+"/"+id
print("Playing event: " + event)
actor.talkie_sid <- playSound(event)
print("TalkieID: " + actor.talkie_sid)
if( actor?.talkie_sid ) {
startthread( @{
print( "Waiting talkie" )
breakwhilesound( actor.talkie_sid )
sayLine( actor, null )
print( "Talkie done" )
} );
} else {
startthread( @{
print( "Waiting seconds" )
breaktime( 5.0 )
sayLine( actor, null )
print( "Done" )
} );
}
return image
}
Thanks a lot for spending time helping me!
Eh … we thought to record all Thimbleweed Park voices in Italian in “several months”. We were too much optimistic, almost 3 years have passed (but now we are near the end).
It’s not as quick as one can think.
3 Likes
I know things usually take much more time then I expected. Yesterday I added another new feature to a game (Bubble Bobble clone) that we started making in 1996. =)
On the other hand, I usually start programing a new project by opening an older project of mine and removing useless features and I still believe it saves time. (Even though I end up rewriting half of it and then copying rewritten parts of code from the project B back to the project A. =)
7 Likes
1996! DOS or Win’95?
We started with DOS, then we moved to DirectX 6 in 1999 and the game was published in 2000. However I keep maintaining it and reworking it. It still does not include all the features that we had planned for the initial release… =}
1 Like
Well, we did record in “months”. If you remove the time spent looking for volunteers, pinging them whenever they disappeared and so on, the recording itself didn’t take much 
I think now, knowing how it goes, we could do Delores in a short time… if it weren’t that Delores isn’t one of us! 
if only it were a Ransome game…
2 Likes
Please guys, don’t pollute the thread. Don’t mean to be rude. I just want to not lose the point of the thread and make it easy for Ron to help.
3 Likes
You are right, unfortunately we often go off-topic.
Thanks for your remind!
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Hi @RonGilbert! We are going to start recording the voice to see how it goes, and I have one question: is there any way to know the character who says each sentence?
If there is no easy way right now, I’m going to do something quick and dirty to parse the dinky and yack files.
Thanks!
1 Like
I already did that in my translation sheet:
(However, I think Ron should consider including it in Translation files in future.)
EDIT: Some lines probably still need adding proper person (coroner?). I used it mainly to choose the right gender so I did not have to be 100%.
There is no way in Delores to know that. In TWP, that information was in the translation files and also used to generate the scripts. Since Delores was never meant to be recorded, I just skipped that step.
1 Like
That’s what I thought. What I’m doing is parsing the script files and when I find a “sayLine” without the character specified as the first parameter, I assume it will be a Delores’ sentence. Is that right?
For this game, that is a good assumption. It was trickier in TWP because a line could be said by 4 different people and had to be recorded 4 times.
1 Like